2 TB Hard Disk Drives: Now at 7,200 RPM. Page 16

It looks like we have just got another proof of the world progress theory. First we discussed 2 TB hard drives with 5,400 RPM spindle rotation speed. And today we are going to look at six solutions with faster rotating platters from Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital.

Defragmentation

Next goes our homemade test of defragmentation speed. We created a very defragmented file system on a 32GB partition of a disk by loading it with music, video, games and applications. Then we saved a per-sector copy of the disk and now copy it to the disk we want to test. Next we run a script that evokes the console version of the Perfect Disk 8.0 defragmenter and marks the time of the beginning and end of the defragmentation process. We run this test with AHCI enabled. For more information about it, you can refer to this article.

The numbers are interesting enough. Western Digital’s HDDs take top places again, boasting very good results of less than 18 minutes. The Hitachi 7K2000 makes it to third place, obviously benefiting by its 5-platter design and good response time in this test. The Seagate Barracuda XT looks very good, especially in comparison with its predecessor. While the LP is just as bad as Seagate’s older products (which used to be sluggish at defragmentation), the XT is almost competitive to its opponents.